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George Mason University

A week ago today, twelve strangers showed up at George Mason University and in five days, going at it around the clock, as humanities people often do, they created a new digital humanities research tool. With almost every day seeming to offer yet another news piece questioning the value of the humanities, One Week | One Tool (OWOT) offers a tangible answer. Funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities grant and organized by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, OWOT created Serendip-o-matic, a “serendipity engine” that searches for “unexpected connections between the material you already have at hand, and the universe of sources beyond your fingertips.”

Credit: THATCamp.orgOn June 7 and 8, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media hosted its annual THATCamp Prime, an “unconference” about The Humanities And Technology. THATCamp started at CHNM in 2008 -- hence the name “prime” -- but since then there have been over one hundred fifty around the world. THATCamps draw professors, graduate students, librarians, archivists, and educational technologists for informal discussions (that is, no reading of papers) and hands-on workshops about how the humanities can take advantage of the possibilities of new technologies. THATCamps have been or will be hosted by major academic conferences, including the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Organization of American Historians.

Stephen Robertson, an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, will be the new director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Mr. Robertson, 45, was a postdoctoral fellow in George Mason's department of history and art history from 1998 to 1999. He will begin his new job in July.Among Mr. Robertson's collaborative works is Digital Harlem, an interactive account of everyday life in that neighborhood in the early 1900s. The project won the American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2009 and an online-history award from a division of the American Library Association in 2011....

The long-planned Digital Public Library of America is set to make its public debut on schedule next month, with a two-day series of events, to be held April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library, and a new, high-profile leader at the helm. The DPLA announced on Tuesday that Daniel J. Cohen, a leading digital-humanities scholar, will be the project’s founding executive director.Mr. Cohen comes to the project from George Mason University, where he directs the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In the announcement, John Palfrey, president of the DPLA’s Board of Directors, praised Mr. Cohen’s contributions to libraries and digital scholarship.